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The 'Kitty Hawk Moment' for Drones

Flirtey

This weekend is the 16th year the Remote Area Medical Team will be in Wise County Virginia providing free dental, medical, and vision care to people. And it’s the first time a drone will deliver medicine to the site.  It’s a real world test of how drones could deliver medical help to people in remote areas. 

Jon Greene is acting associate director of the Mid-Atlantic Aviation Partnership at Virginia Tech. He says when it comes to UAS, Unmanned Aircraft Systems commonly known as drones, the main concern is safety for people on the ground.

“What will happen is, assuming the weather cooperates on July 17th, in the morning, an SR22 from NASA Langley, and an SR22 is basically a general aircraft that has been fitted with an autonomy package that allows it to fly as an unmanned aircraft system or drone,. so there will be a pilot in the vehicle for safety purposes, but it will fly just like a UAS and it will take off from Tazewell, Virginia with prescriptions for about 20 patients and fly that medicine to Lonesome Pine airport in Wise, Virginia. It’s a challenge because there’s a lot of people in the Wise area and we need to coordinate our effort so that we’re not flying unmanned aircraft over people. So that means that we’re going to have to court off some areas and make sure that when we take off and land, there’s none of the public around it."

The drone delivery test will bring actual medicine to people with real medical conditions in Wise. It’s believed to be the first legal drone delivery of meds in the country. And that’s the other important part of this: following the rules for an incredibly intriguing, relatively new device that has literally and figuratively taken off.

“It’s fair to say that there are a lot of people not following FAA regulations and the FAA, I think has really been surprised by the rapid development of this technology and is working very hard to try to find a way to allow people to fly safely and to enforce (the rules against) people who are not flying safely. And the thing that I always remind everybody is, you can be critical of the FAA for not rapidly allowing this technology to be used, but they have provided us the safest airspace in the world and also the busiest airspace in the world by the way they have done business. So they’re grappling to get their arms around this new technology and frankly, the UAS test sites like Virginia Tech and the Mid-Atlantic Aviation Partnership are here to help them do that.”

Green says research flights like this weekend’s medical delivery are permitted on a case-by-case basis; essentially you get a waiver on flight restrictions for research and some commercial purposes.  The FAA is also working on guidelines for low altitude flight, by small drones during daylight hours without a waiver, but those rules are about a year away.

“And then, of course the next issue is how do you fly larger aircraft, and higher? Those are the things that are going to take longer. If you’re talking about full integration of UAS into national airspace, I would say we are at least three or four years out with having the technology ready to go and probably ten years out from having the technology and policy ready.

This weekend’s medical delivery by drone test flight is being called the ‘Kitty Hawk moment’ for the industry.

 

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